A medical application that is installed in accordance with the current state of the art on the local information technology infrastructure (on-premises) of a medical institution is usually only available at the installation site. Access to the data and functions of the application is made possible for the users (generally the physicians) in the form of what are termed worklists. As a result of the local availability of the applications the worklists can only be processed on site (on-premises) in the institution.
As soon as the user leaves the respective institution the worklists remain on the local systems (on-premises) of the institution. Although the physicians possess mobile tablet devices such as e.g. iPads, when they leave the institution they cannot take the worklist and the associated application and data with them in order to process them on the mobile device.
This means that the worklist of contemporary systems also cannot automatically accompany the physician when he/she leaves his/her institution. A disadvantage of this rigid form of deployment is that the physician is constrained into working in an inefficient and inflexible manner. Instead of having the worklist and the application at hand wherever he/she may be and being able to perform diagnostic assessments independently of location and according to the time available, the physician must be located in his/her institution in order to be able to determine the findings.
Solutions enabling an application to be accessed also from an external location are known in the prior art. Thus, for example, there exists a product called “Expert-i” which enables an application to be used remotely. Good network connections are a prerequisite for these solutions in order to set up a VPN tunnel to the clinic and establish a connection to the application. Particularly with mobile devices such as e.g. iPads, such network connections cannot be taken for granted. Rather, a standard mobile communications connection to the internet, such as e.g. UMTS or GPRS, is to be assumed. With such connections, which vary in terms of quality over time, it is not possible to set up any reliable VPN tunnels in order to work efficiently with the application.
Another solution that is employed relatively frequently these days is the development of a new, additional application for mobile devices. Usually this includes only a fraction of the functionality of the original application. Accordingly, interpreting diagnostic findings on the mobile device is possible only with very severe limitations. Furthermore, substantial costs are incurred for the development of the new mobile application.
A transparent solution which enables the application to be used both on-premises and on-device independently of location, and with which at the same time the physician's worklist can be adapted according to location, does not exist at the present time.